Pete Townshend Claims iTunes Is A "Digital Vampire"

Disclaimer: When I was at Warner Bros. I was a strong industry supporter of Apple and the development of iTunes. So please bear with me if I tell you the great guitar hero is so beyond the pale on this that it's laughable. Literally.

In short, his premise is that because Apple is successful at what they do, they should fund all aspects of certain artist's careers replacing all the functions of a signed artist on "old school" record labels.

Let's first consider the facts:

1) iTunes was and in some ways still is the only consumer-accepted effort that gave people a legitimate and friendly alternative to piracy to get artists paid for their work in a sustainable way. (My very first blog comment-- on the day Arianna launched the Huffington Post made this very point in response to the head of the RIAA who was screaming, absurdly, about iTunes being a piracy operation.

2) iTunes' business structure is fair for all who participate: big label, small label, big artist, small artist. A 70/30 wholesale split, with the content owner taking the 70. As for the 30, Apple has a lot of resources committed to keeping everything growing, working seamlessly and swiftly.

3) iTunes democratized the sale and distribution of music. Whether you are a large signed legacy act that can't recoup an advance or an energetic new artist in control his/her own destiny (and profits), the only thing that matters is whether or not you create something some segment of the public finds interesting and succeed in marketing to that group.

If you are an artist that needs a label for every other function besides recording, you can try to get one, and the business will decide if someone will want to commit to you like that. It is now your choice, not a requirement.

More often, smart artists and managers know that they can take control of their own destiny now, and the "value add" that labels provide is a myth and a profit suck. Take from someone who has run several. Modern artists know these tasks are on them (and their team) now, and are seen as a freedom. And, truth be told, they know they no longer need to have their fair share of revenue siphoned by old artists no longer able to make their secure label deals turn a profit because of lack of sales, or, for that matter, lack of good or relevant music. Now who's the vampire here?

4) iTunes doesn't show favoritism. Everyone has a fair shot and their editorial staff isn't biased-- they follow the heat and promote music they think diverse, smart people would enjoy. There are no sleazy backroom deals that have always marked the music biz. From my experience, they don't make picks to treat a subset of artists better than others.

Tuesday's Guardian carried the full text of Townshend's John Peel lecture. He begins by reminding us that John Peel, England's most influential dj, listened. Excerpts:

And he took chances with what he played.

And he is gone.

Why was John Peel's system important? Why is listening important? Why is being ready to give space to less polished music important? Will John Peelism survive the internet? Or is John Peelism thriving on the internet without many of us realising it?

So we have John Peel. The BBC. And-- for the purposes of this lecture iTunes. All enormous icons in music.
Let me introduce you briefly to my inner artist, then I will put him back in his box.

I don't give a shit about making money. I think rock music is junk. I am a genius. The Who were OK but without me they would have all ended up working in the flower market, or worse-- in Led Zeppelin. John Peel played some records that were so bad that I thought he was taking the piss sometimes. The BBC only gave us Pop Radio 1 in the 60s five years after the pirates had proved there was an audience for it. Sadly, unlike the pirates, they didn't accept payola.

I really should put this inner artist guy back in his box yes? Have we got our newspaper headlines yet?

This inner artist really doesn't give a shit about any of this lecture. Just give him a piano and a guitar and some decent way to record the music, a pleasant room to work in, and a few free hours, and he is happy. When he's done he hands me the end product and says-- there, a work of genius, try and live off it for a while, you philistine. It seems to me that a conversation between my inner artist with the late Steve Jobs would have been impossible. I seem to remember that once in an interview I let my artist out of the box for a minute too long and he said he wanted to cut Jobs's balls off. As I force my artist back in the box again, I hear him say that in fact he really likes his iPad and loves to noodle with GarageBand. My inner artist is a bit of an aging Mod you see. He really thinks the late Steve Jobs was one of the coolest guys on the planet: loved his black outfits, cut his balls off, look at my red Vespa …etc. Irrational.

So there was pirate radio, then Radio 1, then a music shop. There were record companies and music publishers. Was it good, what the God of pop music had created?

Music publishing has always been a form of banking in many ways, but-- in cooperation with record labels-- active artists have always received from the music industry banking system more than banking. They've gotten…

1. editorial guidance

2. financial support

3. creative nurture

4. manufacturing

5. publishing

6. marketing

7. distribution

8. payment of royalties (the banking)

Today, if we look solely at iTunes, we see a publishing model that offers only the last two items as a guarantee, distribution and banking, with some marketing thrown in sometimes at the whim of the folks at Apple. It's a fantastic piece of software, I use it all the time and I was honoured once to meet the woman who wrote the software. But iTunes is not like radio.

[I'm not sure what woman he's talking about but the photo just above on the right is Jeff Robin, the guy who actually did create iTunes.]

Radio is less driven by cash flow, a little more driven by secondary income streams (like advertising, subscriptions or in the case of the BBC license fees), and thus needs its pop music to be cool, look hip, cover a wide array of bases and satisfy a broad market.

Let me quickly go over this list again. (do so). Now is there really any good reason why, just because iTunes exists in the wild west internet land of FaceBook and Twitter, it can't provide some aspect of these services to the artists whose work it bleeds like a digital vampire Northern Rock for its enormous commission?

Let's talk it through…

Item 1. Editorial guidance. A&R. Employ 20 A&R people from the dying record business. Have them respond to tracks sent in from new artists. If they feel the artists are bad, or aren't ready, say so. But have them tell the truth, kindly and constructively. Guide them to other helpful resources, don't just send them to the wolves of Blogland where it seems to me a lot of the vilest bile comes from people who could be drunk, or just nuts. A fledging musician at the start of a career is a delicate thing-- even a rapper. (You'll just have to take my word for that.) (Apple do already have back-room people assessing what's hot, but they don't have this kind of power. I'll bet they'd love it. 20 John Peels inside Apple-- imagine it).

Item 2. Financial support. Subsequently provide free computers with music software to 500 artists a year who the 20 A&R people feel merit it. Provide some basic training.

Item 3. Creative Nurture. Follow the work of these 500 artists very carefully. Help where you can. Keep out of the way if necessary.

Item 4. Manufacturing. (This should be called 'posting' today I suppose.) Provide a place on iTunes where these artists can share their music. It should be a like a local radio station. Yes Apple, give artists some streaming bandwidth. It will sting, but do it. You will get even more aluminum solid state LURVE for doing so.

Item 5. Publishing. Help artists protect their copyrights, don't just exploit the loopholes of Grand Theft. This is a minefield today. The internet is destroying copyright as we know it. So they will lose the battle, but guide them to hang on to what they can. Otherwise they might only ever make one album.

Item 6. Marketing. Select a number of the artists on the free shared space local radio station and sell their work on iTunes with some helpful advertising within the Apple software machine. Show that you get behind them.

Item 7. Distribution. Go further. License the best selling artists to other organisations (like record companies, bookshops and highstreet and Mall-based retailers for example) who are willing to make packages, goods you can hold in your hands and give for birthdays, Christmas and Diwali. Share revenue with Amazon. I'm not sure why that notion is so repellent to the Aluminums.

Item 8. Payment. Stop insisting on aggregators to deal with small artists (because you can't be bothered with the expense of accounting for the numerous small amounts of money you've collected on their behalf) and pay direct. Why should an artist pay even more commission to an aggregator merely to get paid? (For the uninformed, an aggregator in the iTunes world is a company who stand between the artist and iTunes and thus prevent Apple having to deal with artists directly. Some of these aggregators provide some of the resources I've pleaded for above, but they are really just another form of punitive banking).

So what does my inner artist think of all that? Doesn't he give a shit? I can tell you now, he thinks all that sounds really amazing. He wants to cry. If Apple do even one of the things on my wish-list he will offer to cut off his own balls (they've only ever been a distraction after all). Etc.

What creative people want is to know their music has been heard. They would prefer a response that was constructive than a positive or negative review. They would prefer expertise to opinion. They would like to know the public if they had a chance to hear the music, also had a chance to make up their own minds. They would prefer that in the long term the public were willing to pay for their music. But looking at the John Peel model what is clear is that just knowing there was a chance the great man would listen, react and offer the music on air, for whatever reason, was enough for budding musicians and bands.

That is where we must be going. Musicians need to be heard, to be judged, if possible to be paid, but also allowed to believe they had more than a single chance to get a hit. Software systems that offer this model will survive and prevail-- loved and embraced by musicians of every sort-- whatever happens financially.

Whether the public listen or not, creative writers and musicians should get paid if their work generates money by virtue of its mere existence on radio, television, YouTube, Facebook or SoundCloud. It's tricky to argue for the innate value of copyright from a position of good fortune (as I do). I once suggested on a forum that people who download my music without paying for it may as well come and steal my son's bike while they're at it. One woman was so incensed that she tried to argue that she was still supporting me as an artist by 'sharing' (my parentheses) music with others who would eventually filter down some cash in some form or other to me, that would pay for my son's bike – and she was not, in any sense, a thief or a criminal. I think she was in a kind of denial. Cutting the body to fit the cloth rather than the correct way around.

We now live in a digital world in which the only absolute is work by the hour. Lawyers, accountants, doctors, nurses, plumbers, painters, truck drivers, farmers, pilots, cleaners, actors, musicians-- they all get paid for work done as a clock ticks.

Creative work is not like that. Any one of the people listed above could create a method that would help other people to do their job in their place. This could be digitised, and made available on the internet. I have given away dozens of my trade secrets in this way, knowing that I could afford to do so, but also knowing that my trade secrets are also trademarks in a way-- I have become known for a particular style of creativity that belongs to me, because I am its principle practitioner.

However, if someone pretends to be me, or pretends that something I have created should be available to them free (because creativity has less value than an hour's work by me as a musician in a pub) I wonder what has gone wrong with human morality and social justice.

The wildly popular official Who videos have all been made unembedable by the copyright owner. But there's this: